Chapter published in:
Contemporary Trends in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics: Selected papers from the Hispanic Linguistic Symposium 2015
Edited by Jonathan E. MacDonald
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 15] 2018
► pp. 71–94

Chapter 4
Variable negative concord in Brazilian Portuguese

Acceptability and frequency

| Universidade Federal de São Carlos
| The Ohio State University

We provide empirical evidence that colloquial Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is a variable negative concord language, which allows negative indefinites (NIs) to occur in postverbal position without a preverbal negative licensor, as in Vi nada ontem ‘I saw nothing yesterday.’ The results of an online survey (N = 443) distributed via Facebook show that speakers’ acceptability judgments toward the lack of negative concord in BP are closely connected to the frequency of the individual NIs, and in particular to the frequency of V + NI collocations. Speaker judgments are also sensitive to the type frequency and token-type ratio of individual NIs. We conclude that variable negative concord in BP is paradigmatically constrained by the identity of the NI in question.

Keywords: Brazilian Portuguese, negation, negative concord, morphosyntactic variation, frequency
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.(Lack of) negative concord in Brazilian Portuguese
  • 3.Online survey of the acceptability of lack of NC
  • 4.Results: Acceptability and postverbal frequency
  • 5.The role of NI productivity
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 February 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.15.05ago
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